When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth

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ERM is a key player in what PLATFORM London describes as the "Carbon Web," shorthand for "the network of relationships between oil and gas companies and the government departments, regulators, cultural institutions, banks and other institutions that surround them."

In the short time it has been on-line, the geostrategically important BTC pipeline– coined the "New Silk Road" by The Financial Times– has proven environmentally volatile. A full review of the costs and consequences of ERM's penchant for rubber-stamping troubling oil and gas infrastructure is in order.

"People were told that there would be 70,000 Georgians that were going to be employed because of this pipeline," Ed Johnson, BP's former project manager in Georgia told the St. Petersburg Times in 2005. "The (Georgian) government needed to sell the project to its own people so some of the benefits were overblown."

Palast obtained information from whistleblowers in Baku who said that, rather than a minor "gas leak," there was a serious well blowout akin to the Gulf disaster two years later. As in the Gulf, the well-capping cement had failed. A methane explosion from the well "engulfed the platform."

"In fact, the workers themselves said that, like the workers on the Deepwater Horizon, they were one spark away from death, with frightened minutes to escape," Palast wrote for EcoWatch. "More seriously, [its] official filing to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission...again talked about a 'subsurface release,' concealing that the methane blew out through its drilling stack."

BTC itself also had a major explosion in its first decade of existence.

"Host Government Agreement – the legal document on which the pipeline is based...[is a] document [that] is not simply a contract, but has the status of an international treaty, and over-rides all other national laws (except the constitution)," explained PLATFORM London. "It denies all future governments the right to introduce any new taxes or laws – including environmental, human rights or labour laws – which reduce the pipeline's profitability."

Environmental critics described it as the oil and gas industry becoming akin to a sovereign nation along BTC's route.

"Turkey is now divided into three countries: the area where Turkish law applies, the Kurdish areas under official or de facto military rule; and a strip running across the entire length of the country where BP is the effective government," Nick Hildyard of Cornerstonetold The Guardian in 2002, speaking to Turkey specifically but which can be applied to all countries which cross paths with the BTC due to the dictates of the Host Government Agreement.

Getting rich quick has also turned out to be more rhetoric than reality for citizens whose property sits along BTC's path.

"One landowner in northeast Turkey reports that he was paid the price of 7 pieces of chewing gum per square metre of his land. In some cases, no compensation has been paid at all," PLATFORM wrote.

KHPR "alleg[ed] multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights including the illegal use of land without payment of compensation or expropriation, underpayment for land, intimidation, lack of public consultation, involuntary resettlement and damage to land and property," CorpWatch wrote.

The most shocking example of the BTC's human rights impact is explained in investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill's book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." He explains that the U.S. military contracted out the infamous Blackwater USA to guard Azerbaijan's portion of the BTC Pipeline and the area surrounding it.

"Beginning in July 2004, Blackwater forces were contracted to work in the heart of the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region, where they would quietly train a force modeled after the Navy SEALs...[to] protect...the West's new profitable oil and gas exploitation in [the] region."

It still remains to be seen what activists will do about ERM's bogus KXL study in the U.S., with the Obama State Department expected to confer with the study's "findings" in issuing a decision on the KXL pipeline by October.

BTC's sordid history – which ERM helped ensure – should also enter into any honest KXL assessment.

"ERM played a crucial role in gaining approval for the BTC by presenting it as a sustainable success. But this doesn't represent the reality of violence and pollution we have witnessed," PLATFORM's Mika Minio-Paluello, co-author of The Oil Road– a new book documenting the slew of destructive impacts of BTC – told DeSmogBlog in an interview.

"Supposedly an environmental consultancy, in practice ERM operated more like a PR firm representing BP and now they're fulfilling a similar role for TransCanada."